Victoria: Plato and Enthymeme

Rhetoric is a very powerful tool used to argue and persuade. And, rhetoric is greatly influenced by the ability of the rhetor to understand the audience and the audience’s ability to understand the rhetor. One of the major building blocks of rhetoric to form this understanding between both the speaker and listener is the use of enthymeme. Enthymeme is a combination of statements that explicitly makes an assertion while implicitly evoking a worldview within which that argument makes sense. Enthymeme is about creating arguments that the audience can relate to under a certain worldview. Without evoking this world view from the audience the claim may lack sense to them.

In my first project “A Modern Day Allegory”, the world view that I implied through my arguments was that we as a society are being raised upon mindless media and it is negatively affecting our lives. So, we must ascend towards enlightenment of the outside world. The points that I made in my piece were for the view that we are in the dark thanks to media and need to ascend to the outside light, but if my world view was understood to be that we are not a media obsessed society, my piece would lack any sense. For example, my arguments were put into the form of pictures to show that we were in the dark I depicted a human sheltered in a dark room only sitting and watching the flickering of mindless media. This greatly contributed to the formation of my world view; but if I had depicted this person sitting in an open sunny field reading or writing, my piece would not be logical and my world view would not be understood correctly.

Enthymeme uses statements to make arguments while defining a world view that these arguments can make sense in. For the rhetor to make an idea understandable to his or her audience they must be able to use enthymeme correctly. Without the audience all having the same understanding about the cases being made it cannot be completely effective. Both the audience and the rhetor must have the same view going in for them to come out understanding each other.